August 2015 - The Diary

August in Scotland means only one thing, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival and delighted to bring 'Letters To Aberlour' to the beautiful Central Halls in West Tollcross. We ran for the entire Festival and flyered by day in full Scottish WW1 costume, suffering heat exhaustion, pouring rain and blistered feet in disintegrating army boots but it was worthwhile as our audiences, although small, were wonderfully encouraging as was the reaction to our publicity campaign on the hard cobbles of the Royal Mile! The photos on this page were taken by the brilliant Paul Henni, who photographed the show as well.

This was my third Fringe, having performed 'Glasgow Hard Tickets' in 1995 and 'Singin I'm No A Billy I'm A Tim' in 2005 at The Gilded Ballooon. 'Hard Tickets' won the Scotsman Fringe First Award and 'Billy&Tim' went on to tour for a decade and filled arenas, so I have a decent pedigree for choosing shows to take to Edinburgh!

Our early reviews were mixed but all praised the level of acting from our lovely and hard-working cast. We streamlined the script, cut scenes and lighting and sound effects and things ran much smoother and the show improved greatly. Really pleased with the reaction and received this nice review as well, from the Edinburgh Spotlight "Simon Weir’s stirring and emotionally-aware Canon Jenks appears on and off through the whole play, which helps to maintain and develop his character and place within the story." 

A huge thanks to the staff of The Central Halls and The Just Festival for making us so welcome and the venue was beautiful, certainly in comparison to previous Fringe venues! Received a great 4 star review from All Edinburgh Theatre with a nice mention in despatches " The dilemmas of the situation are crystallised by the conflicted character of Canon Jenks, whose dismay at how his inculcation of Christian duty has led to so many deaths is well conveyed by the hugely impressive and versatile Simon Weir."

The month was rounded off by more commercial castings in between shows and we were honoured to be joined onstage by the great-grandson of Benjamin Pritchard, who I play in Letters To Aberlour and who had travelled from New Zealand to catch the show. This was my personal highlight of this whole festival and really brought home to us all just how important this play is and that these forgotten soldiers voices deserve to be heard. Chris is photographed (wearing hat!) with the cast below!

A tough but rewarding month and another Edinburgh Fringe Festival under the belt. Think it will be another decade before I venture back! And nice to finish on a high with a lovely review as well!